Who Is Friedel Dzubas?

A fixture of mid-season sales, Friedel Dzubas is a constant presence in the art market but hardly a star. The Palm Beach Daily News explains why:

Dzubas, who died in 1994, was an intimate of some of the most famous names in art — Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Frank Stella, Adolph Gottlieb, Leo Castelli — the list goes on. Critic Clement Greenberg was his housemate for a while. During his lifetime, his work was featured in retrospectives at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. He was a favorite exhibitor at Grace Hokin’s gallery in Palm Beach. In recent years, he’s been less in the limelight. That he isn’t ranked with his more eminent contemporaries is probably the fault of his non-conformist personality, according to those who knew him well.

“If there was a rule book about how to do everything wrong, Friedel could have written it,” said Rose, who was Dzubas’ friend. He refused to cozy up to collectors, curators and dealers. “He didn’t have time for phonies, and there’s a lot of that everywhere in that world,” said Hannele Dzubas, the painter’s daughter. He bucked his pal Greenberg’s advice, which considering Greenberg’s stature as a trend setter, wasn’t in his best interest.